l informed. I might glean something definite there."

"It seems very strange that they are so slow in bringing him to trial,"
said Marguerite in that dull, toneless voice which had become habitual
to her. "When you first brought me the awful news that... I made sure
that they would bring him to trial at once, and was in terror lest we
arrived here too late to--to see him."

She checked herself quickly, bravely trying to still the quiver of her
voice.

"And of Armand?" she asked.

He shook his head sadly.

"With regard to him I am at a still greater loss," he said: "I cannot
find his name on any of the prison registers, and I know that he is not
in the Conciergerie. They have cleared out all the prisoners from there;
there is only Percy--"

"Poor Armand!" she sighed; "it must be almost worse for him than for
any of us; it was his first act of thoughtless disobedience that brought
all this misery upon our heads."

She spoke sadly but quietly. Sir Andrew noted that there was no
bitterness in her tone. But her very quietude was heart-breaking; there
was such an infinity of despair in the calm of her eyes.

"Well! though we cannot understand it all, Lady Blakeney," he said with
forced cheerfulness, "we must remember one thing--that whilst there is
life there is hope."

"Hope!" she exclaimed with a world of pathos in her sigh, her large eyes
dry and circled, fixed with indescribable sorrow on her friend's face.

Ffoulkes turned his head away, pretending to busy himself with
the coffee-making utensils. He could not bear to see that look of
hopelessness in her face, for in his heart he could not find the
wherewithal to cheer her. Despair was beginning to seize on him too, and
this he would not let her see.

They had been in Paris three days now, and it was six days since
Blakeney had been arrested. Sir Andrew and Marguerite had found
temporary lodgings inside Paris, Tony and Hastings were just outside the
gates, and all along the route between Paris and Calais, at St. Germain,
at Mantes, in the villages between Beauvais and Amiens, wherever money
could obtain friendly help, members of the devoted League of the Scarlet
Pimpernel lay in hiding, waiting to aid their chief.

Ffoulkes had ascertained that Percy was kept a close prisoner in the
Conciergerie, in the very rooms occupied by Marie Antoinette during the
last months of her life. He left poor Marguerite to guess how closely
that elusive Scarlet Pimpernel was